If you consider only the climate itself, then it probably won't be utter hell -- large portions of the Earth will still be perfectly livable.

But at the same time -- large, currently highly populated portions of the Earth will no longer be livable, and all of those dispossessed people are going to have to go somewhere else, and compete for the remaining resources of the places that remain livable... which means refugee flows, and famine, and xenophobia, and violence, and war. That's where the utter hell is going to come from. Too many mouths chasing not enough grain.

I wouldn't describe the deaths of billions as "win/win". More like "lose/lose/lose/lose/lose/lose/win/lose/lose/lose/lose", maybe.

The thing is, they wanted to be deceived -- that gave them an out. Now they can go to their graves with a clear conscience, because they "know" global warming is a myth and therefore they didn't really doom their grandchildren. That's all they wanted, is some comforting lies that would give them permission to not worry about it.

You are indeed being overly cynical. You're right that they don't want to eat those costs, but you're missing that they also don't want to lose market share (and therefore sales) to a competitor who is able to charge less because the competitor doesn't incur those costs.

Which is to say, if there is an alternative way to provide the same (or similar) product cheaper by reducing/avoiding expensive CO2 emissions, they'll switch to that, as a way to remain competitive. Which is the desired outcome.

Well, now you've done it -- we have to estimate how water Dennis Ritchie used in the process of writing his C compiler.

- According the Wikipedia, Dennis Ritchie developed the first C compiler in 1972 and 1973, so I'm going to call it two years.

- The average American uses 80-100 gallons of water per day (including drinking water, toilet flushing, showers, cooking, laundry, etc).

So that puts the water usage for Ritchie's C compiler in the ballpark of 65,700 gallons total. Dunno how that compares to the AIs' usage, but there's no inherent reason why an AI needs to use water at all; closed-loop cooling systems are quite doable.

So, Musk could just add some nVidia GPUs into future Starlink modules and call it done?

I wonder if it would help at all to build one modest server into the back of each solar panel, rather than trying to concentrate all of the servers together?

One option would be to just not use orbital servers for jobs where low latency is important. E.g. if you want your server to spend the next four hours optimizing an elaborate programming solution, you can have that done in space, but if you want it to remote-control your Tesla's driving, you'd better use a ground-based server instead.

Realistically, though, latency is the least of the problems with Musk's idea. Other factors will keep this project on the ground.

Well, it's a thing, in that Teslas are driving with it now, but more specifically will it ever be safe enough to be fit for purpose (i.e. to drive actually unsupervised)? To get there, Tesla would need to come up with a way for the cameras to handle bad visibility (such as driving directly into the sun), and it's not clear to me that there is any good solution to that except adding other kinds of sensor for redundancy.

.... amortized over a 30-year operational lifespan, with near-zero risk of catastrophic loss during that period.

That's the cost of doing business in space, sure. But Musk would be competing against companies providing the same service using data centers based on Earth, that don't have to pay that cost because they can just walk over to the malfunctioning server and fix or replace it. Given the rate at which the GPU-farm industry is commoditizing, it's hard to see how Musk wouldn't get underpriced and driven out of the market.

You don't think Russia's nuclear arsenal would still serve as a deterrent against that sort of thing? (Not that I have a whole lot of confidence in Russia's ICBMs actually working, but China would probably have to assume at least some of them would, and that losing some cities would be a bad thing for them)

Fun fact about the Starship: its fuel is liquid methane and liquid oxygen, which when combusted results in exhaust consisting of water vapor and carbon dioxide. So, not great from a global-warming perspective, but not really polluting in the classic sense.

Falcon 9, OTOH, burns kerosene and oxygen, and emits water vapor, carbon dioxide, and soot. Presumably they will start phasing that out in favor of Starship though, when they can.

Musk has done this before. In 2016, SolarCity was in financial trouble, so Musk had Tesla bail them out by purchasing them. Now he's using the same maneuver to keep xAI afloat using SpaceX's assets.

Hang glider pilot here -- a hang glider is much safer than this vehicle. A hang glider has zero moving parts, zero electronics, zero propellers, and zero batteries/fuel, so there's much less than can go wrong with it in flight... and even if you do somehow lose control and crash, there's nothing flammable on board, and your speed is typically low enough that your injuries will be minimal.

The Helix is a very cool vehicle, but I'm glad it's other people flying it and not me :)